The End and Beginning of Something Beautiful
by Luciddreamer326
Summary: A story focusing on the events of "To Love and Die in LA" and "Knockout." Castle and Beckett must deal with the events that have transpired the last few episodes of the season.


Title: The End Can Always Be the Beginning of Something Beautiful

Rating: T

Spoilers: 2x24, 3x22, 3x24

AN: My first Castle fic. Be gentle, please.

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><p>He's never ready when he hears the words again-"My mother's murder." To her, he's loyal unconditionally and even though he never utters the words to Alexis or his mother, he'd follow her through fire. But he still braces for those words.<p>

No, he knows that Kate Beckett was supposed to be the _job_ and she was. (Regardless of that now ridiculous offer for them to "debrief" one another.) Until she wasn't. To the writer, the man of replacing static with dynamic, it's still a surprise how little she works like the books. She covers and keeps shielded.

The compulsion seems wonton, a thing to never be mentioned. About how much he'd love to know the parts of her she never shows him. About the things she buries deep and tucks within herself. Occasionally, she moonlights as a flower and he thinks she has finally unfolded to him, her seemingly impenetrable foundation weak.

Of course, that is until the words. The words that keep them apart. And yes, he aches for her in all the ways it is possible to ache for another beating heart. At poker with the boys, with his supportive mother and daughter, in the bullpen, out in the world-it's just become easier to omit the fact that he's been knocked away by the muse. The one he's unsure he can ever have.

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><p>Initially, he's an enigma and she likes that the man she once stood in line for an hour to get her copy of "Storm Fall" signed is nothing like she imagined. That day, his eyes had gleamed as she told him she was a fan but as she walked away with the novel under her arm, he was still the writerplayboy.

So naturally when he walks into the precinct, into her life and fits none of the preconceived notions, it sends her reeling a bit. He butts into her job and life, filling up her footsteps with heavy shadows. A day before only stacked with paperwork and investigations becomes peppered with jovial conversations she's not really used to having and late hours with a warm body that she acquiesces, (eventually) cares. She tries to tell herself that this Nikki Heat thing will never catch on but then it blazes like fire.

When she looks in the mirror now, she wonders if she fills the grandeur of mind. It's no longer herself reflected back but an overly sexed up and exceptionally confident cardboard ideal. Newspapers call her Nikki and maybe even to him, she's Nikki but she never asks.

She may have liked his books but liking him is more delicate a matter. It's hard not to though when he brings her flowers and deposits warmth onto her skin when all that seems to exist is ice and cold air. So yes, she falls for the writer and weeps into the writer. She becomes so a part of him, not minutely ingrained, that she has trouble finding out where he ends and she begins.

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><p>He follows her to the City of Angels and not once does he ask himself if it's a bad idea or debate the prospect of his return trip home being in a body bag. The steps behind her now are so flowing and natural and he tries to dispel the realization that he's building a world around her.<p>

The fabric of the couch feels smooth under his palms and when he looks into her eyes without all of his fancy words, putting it all on the line, it's surprising how at ease he feels. How oddly poetic it is that her gaze calms his heart.

Beckett runs as she always does and he spends another restless, sleepless night alone. The clock bleeds the green hours away and the faucet drips to the steady thump of his drumming chest. He wants to go to her like one of those scenes from the movies lining his hotel walls. Instead, he lets her sleep and keep her dreams. The only place he allows his feet to tread are beside her when she says, "Let's go home."

He closes his eyes and lets it die in him that wherever she is, he already there.

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><p>When she pulls him aside and his ex wife shows up, she tries to distance herself from him. She doesn't believe in signs but everything happens for a reason they say. Just like when she sees the door close to his room.<p>

Suddenly, it's almost a year ago and she's left gaping again. On the other side of the door, it feels safe. It's not the feeling she wants though, not what she needs.

Nothing good or at least easy would have come from going to him. Perhaps it says something of herself, that she depends on him whenever she feels so lost, but she doesn't dwell on the thought. At least no more than she is capable.

They sit beside one another on a coast to coast flight home. She watches him sleep and something familiar and strange shifts inside herself for him. Staring out the window to just look at anything other than him, she is acutely aware of Royce's letter on her lap. She finds her gaze back to Castle. Royce's words echo in her head.

"If only," she breathes, barely a whisper.

But she worries Richard Castle is more of a forever and at thirty three, she not sure she's ready to know what that means.

* * *

><p>Those words resurface and he cannot really associate anything with the tense hours other than the auditory, the sounds. <em>Too many gunshots<em>, he thinks. Too much air without the words he's become comfortable by.

The court is full of bangs and pops. The shots fired ring in the air with eventual metallic clangs on surfaces. Like a funnel or sieve, his ears and brain filter out everything that doesn't belong to her.

She's compiled of a voice filled with anger and desperation, with sighs and cries sharper than any knife into skin. He causes an uncontrolled, guttural wail by yanking her away from a situation completely out of her control.

He holds her against the car with his hand and envelopes her body like a blanket. Tears stream down her face and feeling the bitter-sweetness of her body under his, he folds against the sorrow emanating from her.

It's all about the hunt and gather now. They're foragers and then scavengers left to pick up their lives that lie cracking on the floor. And then again, she's under him and gasping for air. Bright crimson seeps onto the white of her gloves and he can feel the stickiness clinging to his fingers. The graveness of the situation hits him and all be damned if this is going to become a double funeral.

"Stay with me, Kate. Don't leave me. Please. Stay with me, okay?" he chokes out despite the dryness of his throat.

Her honeyed eyes are wide and solitary tears trickle down each of her cheeks and splash onto the crispness of the uniform he's only seen on her in pictures. She looks buttoned up and put together but underneath him, she's falling apart. All he can do is grip her tightly with desperation that cannot keep her with him.

"I love you, Kate," he breathes and feels his own salty water slide to his nose. "I love you."

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><p>Time passes and becomes more bearable, the "if only" less prominent to the day to day function of her life. Castle's always there but she doesn't dabble with the implications or prospect of greater stories that could transpire between them. It is what it is. He's good when he has to be and supportive when he needs to be.<p>

It feels a bit like fruition without the baggage. They share everything but a bed and its easier like this, even if it isn't particularly easy at all. The verbal joust and the back and forth help her team put even more murderers behind bars. That is always a good thing.

Between it all, she tries to keep it benign and platonic. To safeguard her looks and not acknowledge or embrace the ones she sees from him.

As this time ticks away though, it brings with it heartache. Both literal and metaphorical. The anguish from her mother, from Montgomery, from Castle, slams into her so hard that she screams loudly in her apartment the night before the Captain's funeral and sobs uncontrollably again. This time, there is no hand to cover her mouth. No fingers to sew her mouth shut with sound. No body to hold her as she slides to the surface of the floor.

She becomes one with the ground and melts into it, a ball of skin and pain. The sun rises and she awakens with her face pressed to the surface below her. She glances over at the neatly pressed uniform hanging from the hook on the door and feels numb.

It takes almost all of her energy to peel herself away and take the clothing into her hands. Piece by piece, she sends the crumpled cloth from her that once covered the muscles under her skin that feels as if they have atrophied and died. In front of the glass on her dresser, she stands bare, stripped and exposed.

In the reflection, she does not see Kate Beckett or Nikki Heat. She sees nothing and realizes it is going to take time to transform this wraith into the face she knows. It becomes about the eraser of lines and circles then. Her long locks wind and weave into a ball. She smooths the layers over her body and places the cap atop her head. The last piece falls into place, the white gloves covering her fingers.

_Oh, there you are_, she thinks to herself with a last check in the mirror.

It's so odd how as of late, she even disappears from herself. How she seems to float above her own body at times. The casket in her hands brings her back down to the sad reality though.

The day is lovely and in such stark contrast to the hurricane churning in her. She looks to Castle and he is more solemn than she believes she's ever seen him. They've both lost a friend today. She speaks words to console the crowd, to console herself. Then something hits her, only searing pain that knocks the wind out of her chest.

The grass and dirt are hard under her and Castle is so pliable and soft on top of her. What stands out most though is that her chest feels like it is on fire, tearing away from her body. This is the moment the man above her said would come, that she would find if she kept searching so furiously for.

She wants to scold herself for being so stupid, to think this was all over in the hanger.

"I love you," she hears him say, watches his lips move to tell her.

And she would like to think about what all of this means but her heart isn't exactly doing what she's used to. To say that she can feel it struggle in her chest, just like her lungs are doing as she tries to breathe, is an understatement.

It would be great to feel this moment in a different way. The two of them have been doing this dance, so delicate and ridiculous, and now she wishes this were not its resolution. Her mind treks back to clinging to his lifeline in a freezer and telling him about rewriting endings.

This is life though, not prefabricated perfection. She wants to feel guilt and love and relief and concession. The emotions lie strewn across the blades of earth in the form of her blood, spilling out of her and incapable for him to read. The physical overtakes the emotional and she loses his face behind the lids of her eyes.


End file.
